Independent film

• 1. Introduction

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  Independent film carries a word that sounds simple enough: independent. But in 1908, when the Motion Picture Patents Company locked up every major patent related to moving pictures, that word became a declaration of war. The Edison Trust, as it was known, controlled film production and distribution through a cartel that included every significant company of the era, from Edison itself to Biograph, Vitagraph, and Eastman Kodak, the biggest supplier of raw film stock. Filmmakers who were refused membership faced constant lawsuits and injunctions. Some built their own cameras. Others packed up and moved west, to a California village called Hollywood, where the distance from Edison's home base in New Jersey made enforcement harder. What began as a legal fight over patents became something much larger: a century-long struggle over who gets to tell stories, and on whose terms. The questions this documentary will follow are persistent ones. What happens when outsiders build their own system, only to become the new insiders? And how does the definition of independence shift when the walls between studio and non-studio keep moving?

• 2. The Edison Era and Its Fugitives

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  Thomas Edison owned most of the major patents relating to motion pictures at the turn of the century, including the patent on raw film itself. That single fact gave the Motion Picture Patents Company enormous leverage over anyone who wanted to make movies. The MPPC vigorously enforced its claims, and the independent filmmakers who fled to Hollywood were not romantics chasing sunshine. They were practical people evading process servers.

  Two Supreme Court decisions brought the Trust down. In 1912, the Court cancelled the patent on raw film. In 1915, it cancelled all remaining MPPC patents. Independents had been legalized. But legality and opportunity are different things. The very filmmakers who had escaped Edison's reach had already established production operations in California, and those operations formed the blueprint for a new kind of monopoly: the studio system.

  Director D.W. Griffith arrived on the west coast in early 1910, sent by the Biograph Company with an acting troupe that included Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Lionel Barrymore. They set up on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles, then moved several miles north to Hollywood. Griffith shot In Old California there, a Biograph melodrama set in the era when California still belonged to Mexico. He made several films in Hollywood before returning to New York, and those months helped establish the geography of what would follow.

  By 1913, ambitious figures like Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers had moved from film exhibition into production. By the mid-1930s, five major studios sat at the top of the industry: 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures, and Warner Bros. Below them came Columbia Pictures, United Artists, and Universal Studios. And below that, a catch-all tier called Poverty Row, home to any smaller studio that had clawed its way into an increasingly exclusive business.

• 3. United Artists and the Asylum

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  On the 24th of May 1916, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company was formed, the first movie studio owned and controlled by independent filmmakers. Three years later, four of the most famous people in American cinema decided they wanted their own company too.

  In 1919, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists, each holding a 20% stake. The remaining 20% went to lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo, son-in-law and former Treasury Secretary to then-President Woodrow Wilson. The idea had taken shape the year before, as Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford, and cowboy star William S. Hart traveled the country selling Liberty bonds to support the World War I effort. Hollywood producers and distributors were moving to tighten control over star salaries and creative decisions. The four film stars wanted to control their own work. Griffith joined; Hart ultimately bowed out before plans solidified. When Metro Pictures chief Richard A. Rowland heard about the scheme, he reportedly said: "The inmates are taking over the asylum."

  Hiram Abrams became the new company's first managing director. The original terms called for each partner to produce five pictures a year, but feature films were growing longer and more expensive. By 1920-1921, running times had settled at around ninety minutes, or eight reels. No one, regardless of stardom, could realistically produce and star in five quality features annually.

  By 1924, Griffith had left and the company was in crisis. Veteran producer Joseph Schenck came in as president, bringing with him commitments for films starring his wife Norma Talmadge, his sister-in-law Constance Talmadge, and his brother-in-law Buster Keaton. Contracts followed with independent producers including Samuel Goldwyn, Howard Hughes, and later Alexander Korda. Schenck also partnered with Pickford and Chaplin to buy and build theaters under the United Artists name.

  Still, the company struggled. Sound ended the careers of Pickford and Fairbanks. Chaplin, wealthy enough to work at his own pace, made films only occasionally. Schenck resigned in 1933 to organize Twentieth Century Pictures with Darryl F. Zanuck. Producing partners like Goldwyn, Disney, Walter Wanger, and David O. Selznick drifted in and then away. By the late 1940s, United Artists had virtually ceased to function as either a producer or a distributor.

• 4. Fighting the Majors

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  In 1941, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Alexander Korda, and Walter Wanger founded the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers. Many of them had been United Artists partners. Now they turned their shared frustration into an institution designed to push back against the five major studios that controlled production, distribution, and exhibition alike.

  In 1942, the SIMPP filed an antitrust suit against Paramount's United Detroit Theatres, accusing the studio of conspiring to control first-run and subsequent-run theaters in Detroit. It was the first antitrust suit brought by producers against exhibitors on the grounds of monopoly and restraint of trade. The case was part of a broader legal assault that reached the Supreme Court.

  In 1948, the United States Supreme Court issued what became known as the Paramount Decision, ordering Hollywood studios to sell their theater chains and eliminate certain anti-competitive practices. That ruling effectively ended the studio system as it had operated during Hollywood's Golden Age. Later members of SIMPP included William Cagney, Sol Lesser, and Hal Roach. By 1958, the SIMPP judged that most of the conditions that had made it necessary had been addressed, and closed its offices.

  The portable cameras that became available during World War II, combined with the Society's legal victories, opened filmmaking to people who had never had access to a studio. That combination produced a cluster of critically important low-budget works in the decade that followed. Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Abrashkin's Little Fugitive, made in 1953, became the first independent film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It also won the Silver Lion at Venice. Francois Truffaut cited it as an essential inspiration to his own landmark film, The 400 Blows.

• 5. The Low-Budget Wave

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  Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943, and Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, made in 1947, arrived during a period when the definition of what a film could be was genuinely unsettled. Anger's Fireworks drew praise from Jean Cocteau, who invited him to study in Europe. Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, released between 1955 and 1959, extended this international wave of critically acclaimed low-budget work.

  Deren was soon joined in New York by a community of avant-garde filmmakers who believed the official cinema had become, in their words, "morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, and temperamentally boring." In 1962, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, and others founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, an artist-run, non-profit organization that distributed films through a centralized archive. Jack Smith and Andy Warhol were among its notable contributors. Mekas and Brakhage went on to found the Anthology Film Archives in 1970, an institution that remains central to the preservation of independent cinema.

  Not every low-budget filmmaker was pursuing art. Independent producer and director Roger Corman built a body of work legendary for its frugality. Until his so-called retirement from directing in 1971, he produced up to seven movies a year, a pace the executives at United Artists had once considered impossible for any filmmaker to sustain. Corman's films found the youth market that major studios had lost touch with, using horror, science fiction, and subject matter the studio production code had forbidden.

  In 1968, a young filmmaker named George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead. It arrived after the production code was abandoned but before the MPAA rating system took effect. Because of that timing, it became the first and last film of its kind to screen without restrictions, exposing young children to what Romero's film presented. Films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 and Cannibal Holocaust in 1980 continued in that direction. The MPAA rating system that followed posed a commercial threat to independent theaters by cutting into ticket sales to young audiences, widening the divide between commercial and non-commercial films.

• 6. New Hollywood's Ambiguous Independence

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  Warren Beatty received an unusual offer from Warner Brothers for his first producing project: 40% of the gross from Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, rather than a fixed fee. By 1973, the film had grossed over $70 million worldwide. That deal helped shift the studios toward giving the film school generation significant creative control, and what followed became known as New Hollywood.

  Dennis Hopper made his writing and directing debut with Easy Rider in 1969, a film he produced with Peter Fonda. Easy Rider debuted at Cannes, won the First Film Award, and received two Oscar nominations: one for best original screenplay, and one for Jack Nicholson's supporting performance as an alcoholic lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. That same year, the revived United Artists released Midnight Cowboy, which became the first and only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Midnight Cowboy also featured cameo appearances by Warhol superstars from New York's independent film scene.

  Francis Ford Coppola made his feature debut at the Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain with The Rain People in 1969, a film he had produced through his own company, American Zoetrope. Zoetrope struck a distribution agreement with Warner Bros., giving Coppola wide releases without surrendering creative control. Zoetrope co-founder George Lucas debuted with THX 1138 in 1971 through the same arrangement. Within a few years, Coppola was directing Paramount's The Godfather in 1972 and Lucas had obtained studio funding from Universal for American Graffiti in 1973.

  The boundaries blurred quickly. Films like Taxi Driver and The Last Picture Show were studio productions: scripts pitched to studios, financed by studios, marketed by studios. Coppola chose to self-finance Apocalypse Now in 1979 rather than compromise with skeptical studio executives, but even that decision came from within a career sustained by major studio relationships. Film critic Manohla Dargis later described the era as a "halcyon age" of filmmaking that "was less revolution than business as usual, with rebel hype."

  The period that began with Easy Rider found its endpoint in two blockbusters. Steven Spielberg's Jaws in 1975 and George Lucas's Star Wars in 1977 demonstrated an entirely new commercial model, built around high-concept premises, merchandise, spin-offs, and sequels. The Godfather Part II had made sequels respectable. Now major corporations began acquiring the remaining Hollywood studios, squeezing out the more idiosyncratic filmmakers while rewarding the commercially successful ones. Peter Bogdanovich, who bought back the rights to his 1980 film They All Laughed and paid for its distribution out of his own pocket, eventually went bankrupt.

• 7. Sundance and the Rise of Indie Cinema

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  In 1978, Sterling Van Wagenen and Charles Gary Allison, with Robert Redford as chairperson, founded the Utah/US Film Festival. Redford was a veteran of New Hollywood and the star of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The festival began primarily as a retrospective, with panel discussions and a small program of new independent films. The jury of that first 1978 festival included Verna Fields, Katherine Ross, and Mark Rydell, among others.

  In 1981, the same year United Artists was bought out by MGM following the financial failure of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Sterling Van Wagenen left the festival to help Redford found the Sundance Institute. By 1985, the Sundance Institute had taken over management of the US Film Festival, which was experiencing financial difficulties. Gary Beer and Van Wagenen led production of the inaugural Sundance Film Festival, with Tony Safford as Program Director and Jenny Walz Selby as Administrative Director.

  In 1991, the festival was officially renamed the Sundance Film Festival, taking its name from Redford's famous role as the Sundance Kid. The festival became the primary launchpad for an entire generation of filmmakers: Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Jim Jarmusch among them. The significance of the festival as an institution is documented in Professor Emanuel Levy's Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, published by NYU Press in 1999.

  The 1990s brought commercial validation at scale. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, released in 1990 by New Line Cinema, grossed over $100 million in the United States, making it the most successful indie film by box office at that point. Miramax scored with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, My Left Foot, and Clerks. In 1993, Disney bought Miramax for $60 million. The following year, Turner Broadcasting acquired New Line Cinema, Fine Line Features, and Castle Rock Entertainment in a billion-dollar deal. The acquisitions paid off immediately: New Line released The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, Castle Rock released The Shawshank Redemption, and Miramax released Pulp Fiction, all in 1994. By 2005, approximately 15% of U.S. domestic box office revenue came from independent studios.

• 8. Technology and Open Doors

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  Affordable digital cinematography changed the economics of independent film more profoundly than any legal ruling. The Blair Witch Project, which cost approximately $60,000 to make, grossed over $248.6 million. In 2002, the cost of 35 mm film stock rose 23%, according to Variety, making the shift to digital even more decisive for low-budget filmmakers.

  Consumer camcorders arrived in 1985. Digital video followed in the early 1990s. In 2004, Panasonic released the DVX100 camcorder, which could shoot at the 24-frames-per-second rate standard for theatrical films, opening the possibility of clean digital-to-film conversion. Iraq in Fragments was among the acclaimed films made with that camera. In 2008, Nikon released the D90, the first DSLR camera capable of shooting video, offering a larger sensor than traditional camcorders, stronger low-light performance, and interchangeable lenses.

  The 1999 documentary Genghis Blues was shot by the Belic brothers on two Hi8 consumer camcorders, won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for a Documentary, and received an Oscar nomination. Because distribution was still film-based at the time, the footage had to be transferred from interlaced digital video to film running at 24 frames per second, and interlacing artifacts remained visible in the final print.

  Camera phones followed. New Love Meetings, shot on the Nokia N90, was directed by Barbara Seghezzi and Marcello Mencarini in 2005 in Italy. Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan, directed by Cyrus Frisch in 2007 in the Netherlands, was the first narrative feature shot with a mobile phone, a Samsung. SMS Sugar Man, directed by Aryan Kaganof in 2008 in South Africa, was shot on a Sony Ericsson W900i. Later works shot on iPhones included Tangerine and Unsane.

  Francis Ford Coppola, long an advocate of non-linear editing and digital cameras, said in 2007: "Cinema is escaping being controlled by the financier, and that's a wonderful thing. You don't have to go hat-in-hand to some film distributor and say, 'Please will you let me make a movie?'" Crowdfunding services like Kickstarter extended that shift into financing itself, helping filmmakers raise enough to fund low-budget productions without any institutional backing. The same editing software now available to independent filmmakers, including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, once required an entire post-production house to operate.